egend L Has It
One of the
most colorful
rivalries
in college
football
is 40 years
behind us
now, its
demise a
cryin’ shame
to those
who made
up the
Beat Dook
parade.
by Clifton Barnes III ’ 82
It’s late afternoon on Dec. 7, 1941. The family of Greensboro Munici- pal Judge E. Earl Rives ’ 22, a rabid Carolina fan, sits down to dinner. About four hours earlier, Japan had attacked U.S. forces at Pearl Harbor. The judge is explaining the war implications to his family when his young
daughter speaks up:
“Which side will Duke be on?”
This has nothing to do with basketball.
In fact, some would say the hoops rivalry
between the two schools that share a
county line has been tame by comparison
to what went on between two once-powerful football programs — at least in terms
of rock throwin’, paint splatterin’ and mascot nabbin’.
Judge Rives’ little girl might have been
smarting that fateful day from Duke’s very
recent 20-0 celebration in Durham, the
Blue Devils’ seventh win in the previous
decade. Not until after the war was over
would Carolina regain control of the series,
and then only for the Charlie Justice years,
before Duke roared back for seven straight.
These may be surprising statistics to
those only recently of Chapel Hill, where
the record since 1970 tilts heavily to the
light blue at 31-7-1. But for many years,
Duke-Carolina was preceded by a week or
more of intense buildup in the student
bodies and a media frenzy across the state,
climaxing with the biggest athletic event of
the year and all the social swirl that went
with it.
“It was a blood game back then — it
really was,” said Irwin Smallwood ’ 47, who
would be sports editor and then managing
editor of the Greensboro Daily News, one
of the newspapers that sent extra staff and
reserved extra pages for second-coming
headlines, play diagrams and reams of copy
Ah, yes, good vs. evil
(as if we didn’t
know) on a float in
the 1965 Beat Dook
parade.
